Noah Smith writes about health care costs:
So overall, health care is probably now more affordable for the average American than it was in 2000 — in fact, it’s now about as affordable as it was in the early 1980s. That doesn’t mean that every type of care is more affordable, of course. But the narrative that U.S. health costs just go up and up relentlessly hasn’t reflected reality for a while now.
And he has the data to back it up, though some of it feels like playing the denominator whack-a-mole. Interesting regardless. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
Scott Sumner notes some underappreciated movies, most of which I haven’t seen, so now my to-watch list has grown threefold. He thinks that the greatest films of all time were mostly done in the 1920s through the 1970s, and I absolutely agree! My favorite came out in 1952. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
I had MAID — Canada’s euthanasia program — on my radar ever since they announced expanding their “services” to people who are not terminally ill, touting “substantial savings”. And things do not look good for Canada’s unwell. The ending of that New York Times Magazine article is gut-wrenching.
After four months of waiting, I’ve received a Daylight tablet yesterday. The good: the e-ink display is better than I expected and writing with the pen is as smooth as can be. The bad: at the end of the day it’s Android and needs a Google account for everything. Also, it’s on the heavy side.
📚 Finished reading: The Screwtape Letters by C S Lewis, which I started after a nudge from Kyla Scanlon. A book both timeless and timely, for the reasons she listed and many more on top.
🍿 Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) was a riot. Reading about the intricacies of how they managed to fit all the celebrities into 22 days of planning and 18 days of shooting — on an $8M budget and with a constantly shifting cast — was almost as entertaining.
Yes, investigator-initiated clinical trials take time. But rather than back-patting and boasting about how it can still be done despite the setbacks, why not propose solutions for how to speed them up? I made a few off-the-cuff suggestions but you can also find serious efforts on that front.
📚 Finished reading: Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows. Much like Nassim Taleb who started with probability and statistics only to end in the territory of ethics and values, Meadows starts with algorithms and quantities but ends with higher purpose and transcendence. A book to be re-read.
If you say that “$1 of research investment yields $5 in returns to the economy” — as some do — but then clarify that under those $5 you have a lot of laboratory-building and infrastructure-supporting — as some did — what point exactly are you trying to make? As ever, there is much wisdom in r/Jokes.
A major entry in the Annals of Zombie Medicine must be screening for prostate cancer in men age 70 and above. Recent events had Nassim Taleb asking whether one could detect aggressive prostate cancer early, and one could, but… Indeed, this kind of screening has been singled out as something not to do for more than a decade, and yet:
Prostate screening in men ≥70 has not reached a 50% reduction in use since the 2012 guideline release.
Meanwhile, a full one-third of adult Americans is not doing the kinds of screening that are recommended, probably because they involve poop.